Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Theater historian Glynne Wickham some time ago complained that “where common sense tells us that Shakespeare and his contemporaries reaped the harvest of the seed, tilth and growth of preceding centuries, most modern criticism, with its heavy literary bias, has in fact severed Elizabethan drama from its roots” (Wickham, 1980, I, xxi–xxii; cf. Weimann, 1978, xxii). Wickham's point is well taken in regard to the theatrical significance of the early drama, as is his forceful statement that “the public theatres of Elizabethan London were the crowning glory of the medieval experiment” (1980, I, xxvii). He is referring to the open stage which was superseded by the stage of the proscenium arch and perspective scenes, “translated,” as Wickham says, from “an old theater of poetry and visual suggestion … into a new one of pictorial realism and prose” (1980, I, xxvii). But this very translation, this newfangledness, makes the term “roots” misleading in the context of medieval and Reformation drama in England. Roots suggest a definite course of development, an organic link between earlier and later growth. The metaphor implies a subterranean quality and a promise of ongoing nourishment, while it is impossible to dissociate the idea of roots from the notion of belonging to and nourishing in a native soil. But, as division among critics continues to reveal, all of these associations are problematic ... log in or subscribe to read full text